Tony Nicklinson's is the latest right-to-die case to be made public.

:: Debbie Purdy, a multiple sclerosis sufferer, won a landmark case on assisted suicide law in 2009.

Ms Purdy, from Bradford, fought a long legal battle to ensure her husband, Cuban musician Omar Puente, would not be prosecuted for helping her to end her life.

She backed author Sir Terry Pratchett's idea for "tribunals" to look into cases where seriously ill people want to end their lives.

Her initial application for judicial review in her own case was rejected by the High Court and the Court of Appeal before Law Lords finally backed her call for a policy statement on the circumstances under which a person such as her husband might face prosecution for helping a loved one end their life abroad.

Clarification of the law was subsequently issued by Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions.

:: British conductor Sir Edward Downes died with his wife Lady Joan Downes at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland in July 2009.

The Metropolitan Police launched an investigation and found evidence their son Caractacus Downes had booked a Swiss hotel room and accompanied them overseas but the DPP later ruled that he would not face any charges.

Caractacus and his sister Boudicca Downes said their parents chose to end their own lives rather than struggle with poor health.

Sir Edward, 85, was almost blind and increasingly deaf, while Lady Downes, 74, is understood to have been suffering with cancer.

:: Diane Pretty, a mother-of-two who suffered motor neurone disease, died in May 2002 in a hospice two weeks after losing the final stage of her legal battle for the right to allow her husband to help her commit suicide, at the European Court of Human Rights.

Mrs Pretty said: "The law has taken all my rights away."

She had asked the courts for the right to choose when she wanted to die because she was terrified of dying by choking or suffocation - something that afflicts motor neurone sufferers in the final stage of the disease.

:: Paralysed rugby player Daniel James, 23, became the youngest Briton to die at the Dignitas clinic in September 2008 in a procedure paid for by his parents Mark and Julie.

They were later told that they would not face charges because they had pleaded with him "relentlessly" to change his mind.

Daniel, a former schoolboy international, was paralysed from the chest down after his spine was dislocated when a scrum collapsed while training with Nuneaton Rugby Club in March 2007.